


Don't Walk: Run

by miscellea



Series: We Didn't Start the Fire [1]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Antonia Stark - Freeform, Gen, Rule 63, loosely based on Earth-TRN040, so rated for Toni's mouth what else is new, the media can't decide who iron man is so they keep guessing random celebrities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-05
Updated: 2012-07-05
Packaged: 2017-11-09 05:18:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/451771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miscellea/pseuds/miscellea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The media is already calling her ‘Iron Man’, which is probably a clue that the suit’s silhouette is a bit androgynous… but in retrospect, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. She is done with this nonsense where everyone walks on eggshells around her. </p><p>She is NOT a cripple.</p><p>If she can’t walk anymore then, by God, she is going to fly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't Walk: Run

Hot. It’s _too hot_.

The cave bypasses stifling before the sun even reaches its zenith outside. There is no breeze. The air is muggy and Toni is drenched with sweat before she even wakes up. Yinsen is somewhere in the distance, humming off key as he shaves in a fragment of mirror using a safety razor held together with rubber bands.

Yinsen is a godsend in suspenders and leather elbows; a reminder that barbarism is the exception and not the rule. Toni thinks she might have gone mad weeks ago if it hadn’t been for his cheerful tone and his absolute refusal to pity her. He is the one who puts her back together when the men bring her back to the ‘workshop’ after another round of persuasion at the water trough. He is the one to carry her around the cave after she loses the use of her legs. His slight frame hides a wiry strength that is nothing compared to the force of his outrage.

“How have they done this?” He mutters, testing her unresponsive legs with a needle trying to evoke a response –any response. “You said they didn’t hit you.”

“They didn’t.” She tells him, thinking back to her brief encounter with the leader of their captors; a Chinese man with rings on every finger. The rings glitter in the unsteady light of her memory as he places a hand on each of her knees and looks into her eyes.

“You still think you can run.” He observes. “That is not true. I will show you truth.”

When he leaves, her legs stop obeying her. She has some locomotion left in her hips, but her legs are useless from the knee down.

“My best guess is some form of hypnosis.” She says, thinking of the mesmerizing cadence of the Chinese man’s hands. “That means it’s psychosomatic. It can be undone.” She hopes.

Their best efforts come to naught and it isn’t until the day when she meets Yinsen’s stricken gaze and realizes she has accidently run the blowtorch over the skin of her thigh that she realizes she may never walk unassisted ever again.

‘ _Fuck that_ ’, she thinks and then repeats it out loud.

Toni refuses to die like this, but if she has to then she is going to take every last sonofabitch in this God-forsaken cave down with her along with their stolen Stark tech.

Two and a half months later she is lying next to the shattered remains of the Mark 0 in the middle of the desert while the compound burns with the body of the bravest man she’s ever had the privilege of knowing inside it. She regrets that she couldn’t bring his body away for a proper burial, but as funeral pyres go one made of the bodies of the men who murdered your family before destroying your home isn’t too bad.

She is trying to frame an apology for using her second chance at life to die of exposure rather than being shot when she hears the steady _whup-whup-whup_ of helicopter blades and it says something about how much time she’s spent around Rhodey that she recognizes the sound as three Sikorsky UH-60 Blackhawks.

Toni rolls over because kneeling is a non-starter and holds one hand up in the universal sign of peace.

“Yeah, sure, peace. I love peace.” She said exactly three months and fourteen days prior to her rescue. “I’d be out of a job with peace.”

… and that’s actually sounding pretty good to her right now.

000

“What in God’s Name is that?” Rhodey says. He is sitting by her gurney and bent over her to shield her from view. The arc reactor illuminates his face from below and for the first time Toni understands why they call it ‘ghoul light’.

“God had nothing to do with this.” She says and finishes taping the gauze down over it so the light doesn’t shine through her clothes.

Rhodey does not argue with her.

000

Obie wants her to lay low. The Board is the living embodiment of the good ol’boys club and they have never truly believed in her as the company’s CEO. Only her role as the central brain in Stark Industries’ brain trust has kept them in line. Given her experiences in Afghanistan and her public decision to halt weapons development they have grave doubts about the state of her delicate feminine sensibilities… but that’s fine. Toni has other projects to occupy her time.

The media is already calling her ‘Iron Man’, which is probably a clue that the suit’s silhouette is a bit androgynous… but in retrospect, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. She is _done_ with this nonsense where everyone walks on eggshells around her.

She is _not_ a cripple.

If she can’t walk anymore then, by God, she is going to _fly_.

000

Stane’s body hasn’t even cooled by the time she calls the Board together. The Iron Man suit is stowed safely in the trunk of Happy’s limo where he is guarding it with (no lie) a sawed off shotgun and Pep is a looming shadow behind her shoulder in a dapper suit.

At least one of the board members arrives in his pajamas, escorted in by stone-faced SHIELD agents. Coulson leans against the rear wall of the conference room and doesn’t even pretend to be unarmed. One of his men will be spending the next month in traction. Coulson has taken that personally.

She’s going to have to sacrifice someone in this room to him. The next thirty minutes will decide who. Strangely, given the fact that the board approved Obie’s injunction against her without a single dissenting vote, Toni doesn’t feel bad about that at all.

The room goes deathly still when she enters it supported by the stripped down exoskeleton she developed alongside the Iron Man armor. The balance is still a bit wonky and she hasn’t stress-tested this particular model as well as she could, but has a minimal profile and fits underneath a pair of slinky trousers. It’s worth it just for the look on their faces when she walks into the room in a pair of shiny red heels.

“Gentlemen.” She says. One board member starts to shake in his seat. He knows what her presence here means and she bookmarks him as the prime candidate for her sacrificial pawn. “This is a new day for Stark Industries. Whether you are still around to see it will depend on how happy you make me starting right – _now_.”

000

As far as the public is concerned, Iron Man is her bodyguard. Thank SHIELD for that cover story. The important people know the truth; Pep, Rhodey, and Happy.

…although, frankly, she could do without the rampant speculation that Iron Man is now part of her harem of boy toys. It was funny at first, but now it’s really kind of tragic the way Cosmo publishes all these speculative articles trying to guess who is inside the suit. Their current top candidate is Joseph Gordon-Levitt because he’s about the right height and Toni said ‘hello’ to him at a party once.

Toni won’t lie. She loved him as Arthur in Inception and certainly wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crackers… but he’s still not exactly superhero material. She gives Cosmo a gold star for effort.

000

Pepper takes his promotion to CEO of Stark Industries about as well as Toni expects him to, that is to say; very badly.

Pep has been her right hand man for something like ten years. It’s not even funny. He knows more about running the company than she does in some very important ways and he cuts exactly the right figure in his designer suits and narrow ties that are just _barely_ work-appropriate in the best of ways.

He’ll look after her people. It’s not in him to do anything less. Stark Industries will go on without her like it always has. She regrets losing the company now. It never meant anything to her before back when it was her father’s dream and then later Obie’s, but this is a new SI that is just starting to reflect _her_ vision of the future –a future that she no longer has.

It’s easier to get Rhodey to take the suit. His buttons never were hard to find. One day he’ll figure out what it means that there was an arc reactor pre-installed into the War Machine suit and that the interior doesn’t need to be adapted for a male body. She hopes she’s dead by the time that happens. She has never been able to stand it when he cries.

Happy and JARVIS are easier and harder at the same time. Happy will inherit custody of Dummy, Butterfingers, and U along with her dad’s collection of classic cars. Toni throws in a trust to keep him in motor oil and chrome rims for the rest of his life. JARVIS declines her offer of a robot body so she establishes another trust that will maintain his remote servers for the next hundred years and installs independent net access in each one so that he will never again be trapped in a dark house for months on end with no one to talk to.

So… that’s it.

Toni’s affairs are in order. She’s had all the parties, endowed all the scholarships, and anything she hasn’t built is just going to have to wait for the next genius. She’s doing the little things now while the palladium seeps through her veins like tar; flying the Iron Man armor out to Hawaii for malasadas, cupcakes in New York, and donuts in this little dive she saw on the Food Network once. It has Guy Fieri’s face stenciled on the wall next to the register, which is actually _really_ creepy once you see it in person.

Nicky Fury finds her cradled in the giant donut outside where Guy can’t stare at her. Natalie… Natasha… whoever the hell that is saunters up alongside him. It turns out she’s got a syringe of lithium dioxide stashed up her sleeve, but Toni is willing to forgive and forget as she watches the dark green lattice recede from her skin.

Fury then gives her something almost as good as more time. He gives her a lead.

000

“Dad, you _magnificent bastard_. I take back almost every nasty thing I ever said about you in public.”

000

Toni has overcome a lot in her forty two years of life. A lot of it is stuff she could never have predicted, even with an IQ of 174... but no one ever expects terrorists. They’re like the Spanish Inquisition that way, but with fewer nifty red uniforms.

Pep has almost forgiven her for hiding the palladium poisoning from him. He’s resigned as CEO and seems to have taken up following her every move as a new hobby. Hopefully that will wear off sometime soon. If not she is going to sic Dummy on him.

Rhodey isn’t talking to her yet, but that’s all right. She isn’t quite talking to him either. It is going to take an unforeseen level of groveling before she’ll be willing to forgive him for turning her masterpiece of modern engineering over to a putz like _Justin Hammer_. That was an epic failure in judgment right there.

Fury has rescinded his offer to include her in his little project, which is fine in her book. Iron Man is still in if ‘he’ accepts, which she supposes is Fury’s clever way of making sure she maintains her cover identity even among the rest of the team… or maybe he actually believes that Iron Man is really some schmuck she pays to blow up terrorists. (It never occurs to her that Fury is encouraging her to make the cover story a reality.)

Iron Man hasn’t decided one way or the other. Toni got a peek at the recruitment roster before SHIELD locked her out of their database and Natasha aside it looks like a total sausage fest. She gets enough of that in the corporate world, thanks.

The future stretches out ahead of her like the open road. She’s a genius, billionaire, playgirl, philanthropist who owns a sweet flying robot suit.

Life is pretty good.

… so, of course, that’s when she gets the call that SHIELD has taken over one of Stark Industries’ deep artic salvage expeditions.

Pep’s face is grave when he arrives with the news. “It’s one of the HSE expeditions.”

Rhodey frowns and kindly moves the enormous bouquet of yellow and red roses he brought her as a peace offering off the table so Pep can set up a projection tablet with photos from the incident. “What does HSE stand for?”

Toni’s got a frown of her own. One of the salvagers snuck out a photo on his StarkPhone before Fury’s mooks confiscated it. The focus isn’t great, but she doesn’t need high resolution to make out a set of distinctive concentric circles of blue, red, and silver surrounding the white star gleaming in the watery light through a thick layer of ice.

“HSE is something my dad set up in the forties.” She says. “It stands for ‘Hope Springs Eternal’.”

**Author's Note:**

> Toni is based loosely off Earth-TRN040 and sort of got mashed into the movieverse. This is the first part of a series. Steve is up next.


End file.
